Tag: Enterprise Reporting

Schools Rein in Valedictorian Race

Hypercompetition has led some to scrap title or give it to all with a 4.0.

June 5, 2011

There was a time when selecting a high school valedictorian was a straightforward affair: He or she with the top GPA in the class was appropriately crowned, and tasked with delivering the Big Speech.

But these are hypercompetitive times, and while many high schools in the South Bay and beyond still abide by the old tradition, more and more are taking another approach.

At El Segundo High, for instance, administrators this year officially scrapped the valedictorian title, although a student will still give a valedictory address. Other schools – such as Palos Verdes Peninsula High, Palos Verdes High and Mira Costa High in Manhattan Beach – confer the title on anyone with a 4.0 or better. At these schools – which have actually stuck by this policy for years – there will be 30, 32 and 11 valedictorians , respectively. That’s 73 valedictorians for three schools.

The race to the top of the class sometimes breeds a bottom-line approach to learning, with students emphasizing GPA over educational enrichment. The cutthroat competition can damage friendships, provoke back-biting and even lead to lawsuits.

Jim Garza, the longtime principal at El Segundo High, said it got to the point at his school where the valedictorian selection process was doing more harm than good. Students were edging each other out by one-one-thousandth of a point, and being strategic about which classes they took, often forgoing electives for classes that maximized GPA.

“Last year, there were students who stopped speaking to each other,” he said. “It hurt some feelings and created some disharmony. That’s not what this is supposed to be.”

Occasionally, it gets even more serious. Last year, the No. 2 student at a high school in Rio Grande City, Texas, sued the school district over the way in which the GPAs were calculated. (She later withdrew the lawsuit.) Several years ago in New Jersey, a valedictorian sued after the high school tried to take away her sole honors amid complaints that she’d benefited from accommodations as a special education student. She won.

The competition for the title isn’t just about bragging rights – real resources are at stake. At UCLA, although earning the valedictorian title is not an official criterion in the admissions process, “evidence of achievement” is. And what is the valedictorian title if not evidence of achievement?

“I would say that it looks good,” said Rosa Pimentel, associate director of admissions at UCLA. But she added that the school takes a holistic approach to admissions, and being valedictorian is just one of many signs that a student is driven and successful. “We do turn down valedictorians , because there are so many.”

El Segundo High isn’t the only South Bay school to change its valedictorian policy in recent years.

Bishop Montgomery, a Catholic high school in Torrance, broke with tradition four years ago, bestowing the top title to all students who earn a weighted GPA of 4.5 or higher. (A weighted GPA is one that can go above a 4.0 because of exemplary performance in advanced courses.) This year, the school has 11 valedictorians .

Doug Mitchell, Bishop’s head guidance counselor, said the old way created an environment in which many high-achievers were afraid to experiment with courses that weren’t part of the advanced curriculum, for fear of tarnishing their flawless GPAs. For example, getting an A in art – which has no advanced placement component – could actually have the effect of dragging down a weighted GPA, perhaps from a 4.8 to a 4.7, he said.

“A’s weren’t good enough for some of these kids, and we don’t want that,” Mitchell said. “We don’t want kids to damage their educational experience just to compete for a prize.”

This year, Narbonne High in Harbor City eliminated the single- valedictorian tradition in favor of naming five valedictorians – one for each of Narbonne’s schools-within-a-school, also known as small learning communities. Before, the award invariably went to the top student in one of those communities: the math-science magnet. Top students in other communities – such as performing arts, health care studies and business – weren’t as celebrated.

“We thought this would give us a chance to diversify the type of student who gets the recognition,” said Bo Mee Kim, Narbonne’s college counselor.

At El Segundo High, all students who achieved a GPA of 4.0 or above could audition to give the speech. But officially, there is no valedictorian .

(In another sign of the times, the number of students with a 4.0 or better at El Segundo High has doubled in eight years, to around 40 – or 13 percent of the class, Garza said.)

Of the seven students who tried out, the winner – Cara de Freitas Bart – has many of the hallmarks of a valedictorian . She’s well spoken and driven, with an academic GPA of 4.7. (Officially, it’s 4.6897, she said.) Next year, Cara will attend Princeton, where she plans to major in math.

She learned she won the audition via email, while staying in the dorms at Stanford University, where she was visiting. She screamed for joy.

“Then the whole hall comes in and says, ‘Congratulations,”‘ she said. “It led into a discussion about how, at Stanford, half the students are valedictorians and the other half are salutatorians.”

At the age of 12, Cara ran her first marathon. Since then, she’s run 10 more, plus 11 half-marathons. As a freshman, Cara, like all students at El Segundo High, wrote herself a letter that she finally received a couple weeks ago. In hers, the younger Cara predicted that her older self, by the time she read the letter, would be valedictorian , and preparing to head to an Ivy League school.

Cara said she generally agrees with the new rules, noting how she herself got dinged for taking extracurricular activities like marching band. But she said there is at least one drawback: In prior years, the school’s marquee listed the names of the top 10 students. Now it bears only her name.

“I would like my fellow classmates who have worked similarly hard to be recognized,” she said.

Other local schools have hewed to the tradition of awarding the title to the top-ranked student. Among them is North High School in Torrance.

This year’s winner, Sarah Baik, said striving to maintain that top spot was a good motivator to keep up the intensity. But she said it has its down sides.

“It was kind of uncomfortable for me,” said Sarah, a chipper student who excels in science but also likes to write short stories. “After a while I just became a number. … It’s like I’m not a person anymore, just a robot.”

But even at North, the valedictory address is not necessarily delivered by the valedictorian . Instead, students audition for the honor. Sarah, who plans to study biochemistry at USC, gave it a shot, but lost out to the same student she edged out for the valedictorian title.

“It’s hard standing up and seeing all those people – I keep stuttering over my words,” said Sarah, who finished her high school career with a 4.72 GPA.

“My rival, he got it. Ahh!” she said, with a laugh.

rob. kuznia @dailybreeze.com

Active-shooter drills on the rise at K-12 schools in the wake of Sandy Hook massacre

June 8, 2013

One morning in early April, on the grounds of Richard Gahr High School in Cerritos, the crack of at least 100 gunshots pierced the calm. A few explosions shook the ground.

A few weeks later, at a K-12 charter school in rural Oregon, two masked gunmen burst into a gathering of teachers during a staff-development day. They took aim at the unsuspecting faculty members and opened fire. Bam! Bam! Bam! The shots went off like firecrackers.

In both situations, the bullets were blanks, and the gunmen were law enforcement officers or volunteers conducting a drill.

Had they occurred on the prior side of Dec. 14, 2012, these events might have seemed excessive. It’s easy to imagine how the drill in Cerritos might have raised some eyebrows — the media spectacle involved, the use of not only simulated rounds and flash grenades, but also hundreds of people, including clergy members, local business leaders, community safety volunteers and even students drenched in fake blood. And it’s difficult to imagine that the Oregon drill — a complete surprise attack that left teachers terrified — would have happened at all.

But the landscape has shifted since those five awful minutes at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, when a heavily armed gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, rampaged through the halls, killing 20 students and six adults at point-blank range before turning a gun on himself.

Adding to the sense of heightened alert was Friday’s deadly school shooting at Santa Monica College, the latest scene of an all-too-familiar tableau: police running to and fro with guns, dazed students being interviewed, emergency vehicles racing around with lights flashing.

The news cycle after these bloody outbursts tends to go from hot to cold on short order, but their imprint on the way communities approach school safety has been steadily rippling outward — especially since the Sandy Hook tragedy six months ago.

That horrific piece of American history has cast a spotlight on a certain type of school-safety exercise that, until now, most K-12 schools didn’t really have the stomach to adopt: the active-shooter drill.

“It’s a hard thing because teachers are teachers — they want to teach,” said Kit Bobko, mayor of Hermosa Beach, where the Police Department may soon begin active-shooter drills in the schools. “They don’t want to have to think about, ‘Oh my gosh, if a guy with a shotgun comes into my room, what am I going to do?’ … But we need to have some sort of plan in place.”

Though colleges had been more apt to conduct elaborate versions of the shooter drills before Sandy Hook, the unthinkable carnage in Connecticut has spurred many K-12 schools in the Los Angeles Basin and beyond to follow suit.

Sandy Hook has given rise to other safety measures, too — such as doubling down on counselor hours, installing more cameras on campus or prohibiting parents and the general public from walking onto the premises. But the active-shooter drill could prove to be the tragedy’s most visible legacy.

Active-shooter drills — or intruder-on-campus exercises, as some officials prefer to call them — are similar to the lockdown drills that many schools have long practiced, wherein students and teachers hunker down in the classroom with the doors locked and blinds drawn.

The active-shooter drill is a variation on the theme, but with the creepy factor kicked up a notch.

To be sure, most K-12 schools don’t favor the showy version of the drill showcased this spring at Gahr High. But they often do incorporate the impersonation of a bad guy. Usually, this is a member of law enforcement who roams around campus, jiggling door handles and peering into windows.

Essentially, this new focus marks a shift in mindset, from keeping intruders off campus to dealing with an undesirable who is on campus.

Largely because state law doesn’t require such exercises — as is, schools are required only to conduct earthquake and fire drills — the methods of preparing for the nightmare scenario vary by district.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, administrators this summer will, for the first time, be required to attend training on how to handle an active-shooter situation. Heretofore, the training has been geared toward lockdowns, said Steve Zipperman, chief of the LAUSD police department.

“If an active shooter is on campus, perhaps a lockdown isn’t the best option,” he said, adding that the appropriate response “may involve quick relocations to different locations, either on or off campus.”

LAUSD also has beefed up security. In the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre, the district allocated $4.2 million to hire 1,000-plus safety aides to guard elementary schools.

In Long Beach Unified, where all 90 schools are required to conduct a lockdown drill every fall, the tragedy prompted the district to compel each school to have another go at it. This time, though, law enforcement officials and administrators wandered the campuses, clipboards in hand, turning the door latches and checking the windows.

In Torrance Unified, schools this spring introduced new elements to the lockdown drills they’d long been practicing. For one, schools there now use the term “intruder on campus.” Also, the drills have introduced the novel concept of taking flight when necessary.

At the K-8 Hermosa Beach school district, officers may soon storm elementary school campuses toting guns loaded with paint-ball munitions, revealing who has been “shot.” The student body wouldn’t be involved in the paint-ball drills, which could begin this summer, but teachers might be, as well as selected students — perhaps members of a Boy Scout troop, Bobko said.

In addition, the city and school district could begin conducting age-appropriate, active-shooter drills for the entire student body in 2014.

At Cal State Northridge, the campus police department has been practicing active-shooter drills for nearly a decade, said Anne Glavin, the university’s chief of police.

The campus actually hosted a drill just a week after Sandy Hook, but it had been planned for months. The participating students were deaf — Cal State Northridge has a robust program for this population — which gave officers a sense of how to handle the potential curve ball of directing students who can’t communicate verbally.

Glavin also teaches a workplace violence program on campus that, among other things, instructs staff and faculty on how to spot potentially violent students.

“When we’re talking about red flags, one sign alone might not be a problem, but when you start getting two, three and four, that’s a concern,” she said.

Warning signs could include a person who has a fascination with weapons, or a student whose papers often involve murder and mayhem, she said.

Some officials believe public schools in California are way behind the curve when it comes to preparing for campus violence.

Manhattan Beach police Officer Stephanie Martin points out that while schools are required by law to conduct fire drills, the number of school-fire fatalities over the past 50 years is zero. (The last deadly school fire happened on Dec. 1, 1958, when a massive blaze claimed the lives of 92 students and three nuns at Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago.)

“In California, schools aren’t mandated to do lockdown drills and that’s a travesty,” she said. “Fires aren’t killing our kids; violence is killing our kids.”

Indeed, Sandy Hook wasn’t the only school shooting in 2012. There were at least three others in the United States, as well as 13 other mass shootings. In all last year, 88 people died in the 16 shootings.

State Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Redondo Beach, has long been sounding the alarm on school-safety plans, noting that as late as 2009, roughly a third of all middle schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District didn’t even have one.

For years, he’s been trying to pass a bill to crack down on the inaction. Since 2007, he has introduced it four times, never successfully, Lieu’s aides say. The reasons? Too expensive. Too onerous.

In a sign that times have truly changed, Lieu introduced the bill for a fifth time after the Sandy Hook shooting, and it appears to be sailing through. Senate Bill 49 was unanimously approved in the Senate on May 29, and now must go before the Assembly.

The bill puts the California Department of Education in charge of ensuring that all schools have a safety plan. It also requires the plans themselves to include procedures related to active-shooter and terrorist events.

Some procedures for dealing with an armed lunatic on campus might sound obvious, but are easy to forget in the heat of a crisis, Lieu said.

“Say you have an active-shooter situation and you’re trying to keep your classroom quiet,” Lieu said. “With all the adrenaline pumping, you might not think to turn off the volume on your cellphone. Maybe you think to lock the door, but not to barricade it shut with your desk.”

School safety experts also recommend that, should an intruder barge in, office personnel get on the school intercom and use direct — even blunt — language about what is happening.

“Use simple language — no coded language,” said Susan Chaides, who, as the project director over the safe-schools division of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, trains school administrators on school safety. “Say: ‘There is an intruder — an armed intruder.’ It doesn’t matter if they (the intruder) can hear.”

(During the Sandy Hook massacre, a quick-thinking employee in the office flipped on the loudspeakers, capturing the horror but likely saving many lives.)

Also blurry is the line that separates adequate preparation on the part of school districts and hysteria.

The month after the Sandy Hook shooting, a school board in Montpelier, Ohio, approved a plan to arm the custodial staff with handguns. In April, a school district in Minnesota purchased bulletproof whiteboards that could be used as a shield to protect teachers.

Chris Bentley, the former president of the Hesperia Unified school board, the High Desert’s largest school district with 21,000 students, is skeptical of heavily armed school police forces and the now-popular, active-shooter drills.

Bentley cited the U.S. Secret Service’s 2002 Safe Schools Initiative report prepared in response to the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. (www2.ed.gov/admins/lead/safety/preventingattacksreport.pdf)

“There’s 10 key findings that they have,” he said. Among them: ” ‘Despite prompt law enforcement responses, most shooting incidents were stopped by means other than law enforcement intervention.’ ”

Bentley, a father of four school-age children and a former Marine, would rather have school faculty and staff trained on how to deal with these emergencies.

“When push comes to shove, I want somebody to have a cool head in the classroom, as we hear all the hero stories coming out of Sandy Hook and wherever,” he said. “Yes, the cavalry’s going to get there, but it’s going to take time.”

Fontana Unified made national headlines in January when the district bought 14 military-style rifles to arm the district’s police force. Bentley believes that was likely an expensive waste of their time.

“If you’re going to buy high-powered rifles, you need to be trained on them, on a pretty regular basis,” said Bentley, a former Marine. “It’s not just like your sidearm.”

The suspect in the Santa Monica shootings was ultimately confronted by two Santa Monica police officers, and one officer from Santa Monica College, who exchanged gunfire with him in the campus library, ultimately killing him.

Santa Monica Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks said the officers used their training, which had in part been developed through studying other mass shootings.

“The Santa Monica Police Department co-trains with the Santa Monica Community College Police Department and we engage in rapid response training, which is consistent with the lessons learned from many of these other mass shootings — unfortunately those that have happened both in college settings and elsewhere,” Seabrooks said. “That training was clearly utilized by the three responding officers who neutralized that suspect, as one would expect.”

One disconcerting aspect of not only Sandy Hook but also the 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton Colo., is that both schools were actually pretty secure.

Columbine employed an armed guard, who exchanged gunfire with the killers. At Sandy Hook, Lanza was greeted by a locked glass door. He took aim with a rifle and shot through it.

“They had cameras everywhere, and buzzer systems,” said Mary Sue, superintendent of the ABC Unified School District in Cerritos. “Their staffs were pretty well prepared in lockdown systems.”

Sue noted that the very same day law enforcement officials were performing the dramatic practice raid at Gahr High, she was at a school leadership conference featuring the two district superintendents who were in charge during the Sandy Hook and Columbine tragedies. Interestingly, those leaders stressed a different kind of preparedness: making sure mental-health services are available for children who need it.

In keeping with this advice, the ABC district has — in addition to installing more security features on its campuses, such as cameras, better lighting and emergency call buttons — boosted its mental health programs. The district recently partnered with the USC School of Social Work to assign to every school social work interns who get to know the students on a personal level.

In Hermosa, the district increased its counselor hours after Sandy Hook, and expanded a program — called MindUP — that teaches students how to better manage their emotions.

“It’s teaching kids about how your brain works — how decision-making works,” said Patricia Escalante, the district’s superintendent. “You can choose to be an optimist. And you can control your feelings.”

In Redondo Beach, educators are trying to keep an eye out for kids who might feel marginalized.

Frank DeSena, assistant superintendent of student services in the Redondo Beach Unified School District, said, sometimes, the simple act of a principal saying hello to a wayward student by name can make a big difference.

“Let’s look at the type of person who has been a shooter,” he said. “The common thread (among school shooters) is most of the time they were the outlier type of young people. They weren’t connected to their school or their community.”

Making them feel more connected, he added, can start with a simple hello.

Staff writer Beau Yarbrough contributed to this report.

California ranks 49 nationally in per-pupil spending, but tide is poised to change

July 27, 2013

It’s difficult to believe now, but there was a time — through the eras of flower children, bell bottoms and disco — when the Golden State was widely seen as the gold standard on education spending.

Class sizes were low. Schools were well maintained. Textbooks and other instructional materials were new.

Back then, California ranked in the top 10 nationwide in per pupil education spending.

The abundance made an impression on Michael Kirst, now the president of the California State Board of Education, when he moved to California from Virginia in 1969.

“There was free summer school for every kid that wanted it,” he said. “I’d never heard of such a thing.”

A multitude of factors has caused California’s relative standing in school spending to sink like a gold coin in a swimming pool.

The state now ranks 35th in per pupil spending, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. Factor in cost-of-living considerations and California’s place in the pecking order among all 50 states and the District of Columbia is a dismal 49. That’s ahead of only Nevada and Utah, according to a widely cited annual January report by Education Week. (Per-pupil spending figures from Education Week include state and local funds, but not federal money, or funds for capital improvements. Census figures include federal dollars but also exclude capital outlay.)

However, the needle is poised to begin moving in the other direction, thanks to two big game-changers. One is the November passage of Proposition 30, the temporary tax hike that will primarily benefit public education. The other, which was signed into law in late June, is the Local Control Funding Formula — Gov. Jerry Brown’s successful attempt to revolutionize the way school dollars are distributed.

The first wave of replenishment will hit the coffers of local school districts this fall, mostly in modest fashion. The infusion is expected to increase year by year for a time, but specific numbers are tough to come by.

The Governor’s Office has projected that, by 2016-17, California will boost its per-pupil spending by $2,800 over the 2011-12 amount, bringing it to somewhere near the current national average in raw dollars. That would be quite a bump, but that projection is questioned in some education circles.

In any event, the approaching relief raises an intriguing question: to what extent — if at all — will more money lead to better academic performance? It’s a question that the brightest minds in education have been debating for years.

“Some would argue there is very little correlation,” said Maggie Weston, a research fellow with the Public Policy Institute of California. “Others would say we probably should be spending more money, but it’s about wise investment. So, just spending more money in exactly the same way probably won’t lead to better student outcome.”

As it happens, California’s level of its funding lines up pretty neatly with the performance of its students.

Much as it ranks 49th on cost-adjusted per-pupil spending, its nationwide standing in academic performance on math and English tests among fourth- and eighth-graders ranges from 46th to 49th, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the most authoritative source of interstate comparison on academic performance.

Similarly, Vermont, which occupies the No. 1 spot nationwide on per-pupil spending by Education Week’s measure, ranks an impressive 6th in fourth-grade mathematics.

But on the other hand, test scores in California have risen steadily over the past half-decade, even though that stretch of time marks one of the worst five-year periods for school finance in state history.

“If you take the negative angle, you could say ‘so money doesn’t matter,’ ” said Peter Birdsall, executive director of the California County Superintendents Educational Services Association. “Public school educators in California did a wonderful job. … The problem is, people can only keep up that level of exertion for so long.”

And then there is the puzzle of Texas.

Per pupil spending in the Lone Star State is in the neighborhood of California’s, clocking in at 44th nationwide by the measure of Education Week. And yet, students in California are vastly outperformed by their peers in Texas — the nation’s second-largest state, whose demographics closely mirror those of California. (In both states, for instance, Latino students have recently become a majority population in the schools.)

Eighth-graders in Texas rank 10th nationally in mathematics; their counterparts in California are at the bottom of the heap, just above Mississippi and Alabama, at 49th.

In his book, “The Money Myth,” Norton Grubb, professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, makes the case that money’s ability to boost performance in schools is often overstated.

Grubb is quick to clarify this thesis.

“I would never say money doesn’t make a difference; money does make a difference,” he said.

It’s just that some expenditures are more effective than others, Grubb said. Raising teacher salaries, for instance, correlates to better test scores, graduation rates and credits earned, he said. Investing in school counselors tends to reap similar results. Conversely, some spending has produced little in the way of measurable academic benefits. Falling into this category, according to Grubb, are the class-size reduction efforts of recent years and intervention programs for lagging students.

Grubb has even found a relationship between some forms of spending and worse performance. The biggie here, Grubb says, is traditional vocational arts classes such as automotive and shop class.

As for California’s low national standing on school spending, it doesn’t extend to teacher pay. At $68,500, the salary of the average teacher in California during the 2011-12 school year ranked fifth nationwide, according to the National Education Association.

Conversely, California schools have the fewest number of adults in contact with children. This includes not only teachers, but administrators, librarians and counselors.

“We are dead last,” Kirst said. “That is really compelling. More interesting even than class size. We have less of everything — even janitors.”

The history of California’s funding decline is complex, but a couple of momentous events are widely seen as change agents.

The first was a landmark lawsuit in the early 1970s — Serrano v. Priest — that sought to correct an inequity: school districts in wealthy areas had way more money than their counterparts in poor areas. The courts agreed with the plaintiff, John Serrano — a parent of a student in the Los Angeles Unified School District — that the funding formula violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Limits were placed on per-pupil expenditures.

The second was the 1978 passage of Proposition 13 — an epic shake-up in government that provided tax relief to homeowners but shifted the burden of education funding from the local level to the state.

Why did this cause a drop-off? Experts aren’t certain. One theory, put forth in a report by the Public Policy Institute of California, suggests that before the initiative, the property taxes paid by commercial interests subsidized schools to a greater degree.

Another theory — expressed by Sacramento Bee journalist and author Peter Schrag — attributes the backslide to white voters’ increasing reluctance to support an education system that benefits a higher and higher percentage of nonwhite students.

In any case, by many accounts, Proposition 13 generally marks the point at which California’s national standing on per pupil funding began to dip below the national average.

All the while, a massive wave of immigration has led to a demographic sea change leaving schools in a much needier position. (Latinos, who make up one of the most disadvantaged demographics in education, made up just 12 percent of the state’s population in 1970, and now constitute 38 percent of all Californians.)

Approved in June by the state Legislature, Brown’s Local Control Funding Formula popularly grants school districts much more local control in deciding how to spend their dollars. The controversial part is how it also dedicates significantly more money to the districts serving disadvantaged students.

Many school leaders in the suburbs fear the formula will give their districts short shrift.

Among them is George Mannon, superintendent of the Torrance Unified School District, who believes the numbers are based too much on intuition, and not enough on hard facts. He contends it would have been better to wait a year and use that time to carefully study how much more money is truly needed to educate disadvantaged students.

“We’re making decisions without basing them on research,” he said.

Legislatively, it has been surprisingly popular. The funding model was approved by not only a majority of Democrats in both the state Senate and Assembly, but of Republicans, who relish the return of local control.

“The current system was collapsing and had no defenders,” said Kirst, a professor emeritus at Stanford who is widely considered the father of the state’s brand-new formula.

(Brown’s Local Control Funding Formula was based on “Getting Beyond the Facts,” a 2008 report co-authored by Kirst, former California Secretary of Education Alan Bersin and now-state Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu.)

Grubb sees Proposition 30 and the Local Control Funding Formula as the one-two punch needed for progress: more money, and smarter use of it.

But he cautions that it could be a long time before improvements are measurable. “California has spent about 35 years making these problems,” he said. “It’s going to take another 35 to get us out of the problems.”

THE HARD TRUTH about education funding

No link: Funding and academic performance aren’t necessarily linked. (Texas is funded at a similar level to California, yet its students perform quite a bit better.)
A little-known fact: Brown’s Local Control Funding Formula played surprisingly well among Republicans. (It passed with Republican majorities in both chambers.)
Pay day: California’s teachers are the fifth highest paid in the nation, according to the National Education Association.
Ratio: California’s schools are dead last on the ratio of adults to students in schools.
Tumble: Back in the 1960s, California’s per-pupil spending ranked in the top 10 nationwide.
Source: LANG research

API school test scores expected to vanish in California for 2 years — maybe forever

Jan. 24, 2014

Real estate agents use them to tout the desirability of neighborhoods. Parents monitor them to choose schools. Principals live and die by them.

But Academic Performance Index scores, the cornerstone of the state’s accountability system in K-12 education, are expected to take a two-year sabbatical beginning this year. And when the API scores return — assuming they do — they’ll be a markedly different beast. What form they will take is a big unknown.

This could come as a rude awakening to the California public, which has become almost as familiar with the term “API” as Americans have long been with acronyms like GPA and P.E.

“The general public and parents and even the Realtors — they have no idea,” said Bill Lucia, executive director of the education advocacy group EdVoice. “People are going to be very confused.”

The change also promises to be challenging for educators.

“I’m really leaning on my department chairs to make sure instruction continues to be challenging,” said Mitzi Cress, principal of the high-performing Palos Verdes Peninsula High. “But the fear is not knowing. It’s a bit like being blind — you’re moving forward and you think you’re doing well … but you never know until those test scores come out and now we don’t have that.”

Assigned to schools every fall (usually in late August) based on the performance of students on a handful of springtime tests, the API boils the academic performance of entire schools to a number ranging from 200 to 1,000. In a sense, it’s the equivalent of an A through F letter grade for any given school, inviting easy comparisons between and among schools, with the state-set goal of 800 amounting to a B, and anything above 900 in elite territory.

That’s about to change.

“The whole rating system based on performance of the California Standards Tests, and the scaling system based on 800 — that is history,” said Michael Kirst, a professor emeritus at Stanford University and the president of the California State Board of Education. “So the real estate agents will have to get into some new concepts.”

Kirst acknowledges that it isn’t yet known what the API will look like — or even if there will be an API — on the other side of the two-year break.

Why the murkiness? Put simply, the California public school system is awash in historic reforms — from the curricula that must be taught and tested to the way schools are funded — and state policymakers haven’t gotten around to deciding whether the API in its current (or any) iteration should remain the benchmark for success.

“The whole world has just changed,” Kirst said. “Figuring out accountability with this is something that the board has to do by 2015.”

He added that the changes in education are so vast that it is impossible for the board to address them all simultaneously.

“There’s just so much new policy it’s mind-boggling,” he said. “You have to approach it one conceptual domain at a time.”

Valid or not, arguments about complexity do little to mollify the advocacy groups who view the lack of data as a way to keep the public in the dark about the performance of its own schools.

“What it says to me is the state is just not interested in letting parents be a part of this process,” said Gabe Rose, deputy director at Parent Revolution. “How can we be a part of school improvement if we’re not getting any information about how schools are doing?”

Chief among the landmark education reforms underway is an approaching tidal wave: new content standards, which amount to a description of what students are expected to learn at each grade level.

Come fall of 2014, the California content standards — the guidepost for K-12 instruction in the Golden State since the late 1990s, will be fully replaced by Common Core — a nationwide set of content standards that aim to put a premium on critical-thinking skills over rote memorization.

Replacing the standards also means overhauling the system of assessments. Until now, students every spring have been sharpening their pencils for the STAR tests (for Standardized Testing and Reporting), which measure their grasp of the state standards.

In their place will be a system called Smarter Balance, (also referred to as Measurement of Academic Performance and Progress, or MAPP) which will swap out the old pencil-in-the-bubble exams for math and English with computerized tests. Students in grades 3-8 and 11 will take the tests this year on a trial basis. (For parents, the switch means that, for the first time in years, the state will not mail them the individual results of their children’s performance on the springtime exams.)

API changes

To smooth the transition of this huge undertaking, state lawmakers last fall passed Assembly Bill 484, which ends the STAR tests. AB 484 also provides the authority to the state Board of Education to suspend API scores for the 2013-14 and 2014-15 school years — a decision expected to be made at its March meeting.

This is a big disappointment to Kimberly Vawter, an assistant principal at Valor Academy Charter School in the San Fernando Valley, who teaches a middle-school class that encourages students to look at API scores when selecting a high school.

“We are very big right now in (the Los Angeles Unified School District) on school choice,” she said. “Now I feel like we are giving them a choice without giving them any information.”

If the API continues to exist — and most education watchers believe it will — the qualities it measures will be markedly less based on testing, at least in the high schools.

Under a little-known law passed in 2012, the test-score quotient of the API for high schools can be no more than 60 percent by 2016-17. To date, the API — though the product of a complex formula — has been derived 100 percent from the performance of students on tests.

Soon, in the high schools, 40 percent of the API must be based on other metrics. The specifics have yet to be hashed out, but the new components are likely to include graduation rates, dropout rates and college-and-career readiness benchmarks.

The bill’s author, Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, hails it as a major step toward moving beyond an era that tempts instructors to teach to the test.

“The API to me is not an end, it’s a means to an end,” he said. “We’re trying to create a jolt to the system that leads to curriculum being taught in ways that are both rigorous and relevant to what people might want to do with their lives.”

His bill actually has a supporter in Parent Revolution, which believes it strikes the right balance between one extreme (over-reliance on test scores) and the other (no information at all).

“Some people think test scores are the only thing that matter — we fought against that regime,” said Rose of Parent Revolution, a group best known for its advocacy of the parent-trigger law allowing parents to convert underperforming public schools into charter schools. “But we also believe they need to be a piece of the puzzle.”

Some aren’t so certain that diluting the influence of test scores on the API is a step in the right direction. Paul Warren, a research associate with the Public Policy Institute of California, says that on the one hand, it’s a more holistic way of measuring a school’s performance. On the other, he said, it leads to more ambiguity.

“When these other things are incorporated, you don’t exactly know what it means when scores are high or low,” Warren said. “It gets more complicated.”

Lucia of EdVoice puts it more bluntly.

“It’s a muddled mess right now,” he said. “It’s like mixing a bunch of colors — you’re just going to get brown.”

Further diluting focus on test scores is an obscure provision of a new school funding formula approved this past summer by the state Legislature. The overhaul — a brainchild of Gov. Jerry Brown known as the Local Control Funding Formula — not only shifts more money to school districts with high numbers of disadvantaged students, it also grants local school districts more autonomy in spending.

Somewhat paradoxically, in order to earn this local control, all school districts are required by the state to create a “local control accountability plan” that demonstrates how their schools will meet expectations in eight priority areas set by the state.

API scores in and of themselves don’t even make up one of these eight areas. Instead, they’ve been relegated to one of several bullet points under the priority titled Student Achievement. Other priorities include Student Engagement, Parental Involvement, Course Access and Implementation of Common Core.

State educators point out that the accountability plans pertain to a new, local layer of accountability, not the statewide one long associated with STAR testing. But even local school administrators are confused about what role it will play, not to mention a little annoyed at the fuzzy plan for its rollout.

Tim Stowe, chief academic officer of the Torrance Unified School District, notes that while the deadline for local districts to submit their local-control plans is July, the state won’t release the rubric for how those plans will be evaluated until October 2015.

“These timelines are out of whack,” he said. “It’s ludicrous.”

If school administrators are confused about what is around the corner, the general public isn’t even aware major change is afoot.

“When I talk about this to friends of mine who have kids … they are hearing about it for the first time,” said John Lee, executive director of the advocacy group Teach Plus. “To them, it doesn’t pass the smell test that we’re moving into this phase where, for three years, there is not going to be any accountability system in place.”

But Kirst believes the end result of a more holistic picture will be worth the growing pains.

“Schools are complex and have many dimensions,” he said. “To have everything hinge on a single test taken on a single day is too narrow.”